An A-Star helicopter has 779 horsepower, burns through eight gallons of fuel every ten minutes, and can reach a top speed of 169 miles per hour. Its rotor blades spin at 591 miles per hour, sending down a gale-force gust and generating ninety-one decibels, about as much noise as a subway train. A machine like this does not inspire thoughts of environmental sensitivity. Odd, then, that it should be such a gentle means by which to explore the wild.

But consider the alternatives. Roads are certainly a more populist form of transportation; however, they cut rudely through the wilderness, bring tar, litter, toxic exhaust, and gas stations to a fragile environment, and literally pave the way for thousands, if not millions, of sightseers. Hiking may seem benign, but hikers light fires and produce waste, and their scent sends animals bolting in every direction. The fact is that when it comes to treading lightly, it is hard to do better than a five-thousand-pound helicopter.

If you're standing on the side of a mountain two hundred miles north of Vancouver, treading lightly is rather the point. That's because the wilderness on all sides happens to be the largest temperate rain forest on the planet. It is known as the Great Bear Rainforest, and it extends across the innumerable valleys of the Coast Mountains, like a thick green blanket of life settled among icy peaks.

The mountains are notable for two reasons. They make for stunning scenery, and they are all but inaccessible to humans. By land, the route is either up or down. Where there isn't land, there is water—deep and salty or fresh and flowing. Traveling by boat, one can penetrate the rain forest's seaward edge. There is a loose patchwork of logging roads, and the odd town with a fanciful native name like Bella Coola or, my favorite, Bella Bella. But the vast majority of the forest is unnavigable. After a helicopter, your best bet for getting around would be a NASA jet pack.

For this reason, there are three helipads at Nimmo Bay Resort, which is located on the rain forest's southwestern edge. As resorts go, it is small and nearly as delicate as the landscape that surrounds it. There's a floating lodge and, next to it, a floating bakery, both of which rest on aluminum pontoons that bob up and down with the tides, just as the float houses built by local loggers and fishermen have for generations. And there are nine raised guest cabins that sit on the constantly fluctuating boundary between land and sea called the intertidal zone. Behind these cabins, a frigid river drops into a plunge pool, bringing down the melted snow from the top of Mount Stevens, which stands mightily at the head of a long and winding sound that terminates at Little Nimmo Bay.

Everything you do at Nimmo Bay you do by helicopter. There is little choice in the matter. If you wish to spend the morning hiking on an alpine summit forty miles away, where you can amble through a field of wildflowers and drink from the little rushing creek that slices right through it, you get there by helicopter. If you then feel like eating lunch next to a glacial lake 180 miles away, you fly there in a helicopter. And if you fancy heading out to the coast to spend the remainder of the afternoon exploring a crescent of golden sand—well, you get the idea.

In truth, you could experience just such a day without a helicopter, but it would take more like a year—a grueling, likely fatal year. The first fifty miles alone would require at least a week, since walking through a temperate rain forest can be like swimming through cake batter: It gets so dense that you have to inch along on your stomach, at which time thoughts of the resident grizzlies would surely enter your head. After the first fifty miles, you'd have only twelve six-thousand-foot mountains, eleven rivers, and six glaciers to go before you arrived at that alpine hiking spot. Not that you'd be in any mood to hike after several months of bushwhacking and mountaineering, fighting your way through salmonberry brambles, getting raked by blackberry bushes, all the while laden with hundreds of pounds of supplies.

An A-Star helicopter does the same trip in about ten minutes. It stays with you from morning until evening, faithfully and dutifully standing by in case you spot, say, a mountain peak off in the distance and mistily wonder what it's like. With a helicopter, you can fly over to that peak, set down on the very top, and perhaps be the first person ever to do so.

Biting into a Dungeness crab cake while standing on the summit of Mount Benedict, I can actually see the waters where that crab once lived. The Queen Charlotte Strait is a good forty miles away, across a stretch of meringue peaks that become green and rounded as they approach the sea. Beyond it, I can just make out the brutish mass of Vancouver Island, which is where the cheese on my plate—a Brie-like wedge with a bloomy rind—came from. In the opposite direction stands Mount Waddington, the highest peak in British Columbia, a spire of granite so big that it creates its own weather. (You would too if you were 13,180 feet tall.) Somewhere southeast of it sits B.C.'s Okanagan Valley, which is where the white wine I am sipping was made.

Lunch at 6,200 feet is among the more rarefied culinary experiences: The air is deliciously pure, and the canopy of blue hangs just out of reach. There is nobody around but our little group—me, two couples from Chicago, and the pilot, Kevin. The helicopter is parked a few feet away on a carpet of gleaming snow, its rotor blades drooping lazily in the July sun, as though grabbing a quick nap before resuming chauffeur duties. None of us has seen another soul since liftoff this morning. Actually, that's not entirely true: We saw a mountain goat.

That was twelve hundred feet ago. Kevin was hovering over an alpine lake of a ridiculously intense blue. It was the kind of blue that sapphires aspire to, a ringing, brilliant azure you could practically hear, and Kevin was banking in slow circles, giving us all time to stare down and blink in disbelief. On the third pass, we spotted the mountain goat, which was downy white and springing around the rock face like Fred Astaire.

Not long after that, Kevin dropped the helicopter onto a sandbank in the middle of a green river, and when the blades stopped spinning, the six of us got out and started walking around in the middle of nowhere, as though we did that sort of thing all the time. The water ran clear where it was shallow, but in the depths it was a dark, mysterious green. Where it was deepest, I could see what looked like aquatic plants waving in the current, or perhaps the interplay of shadows from the big fir trees overhead. It was neither. It was a school of pink salmon, about five hundred altogether. In a month, they would be miles upriver, their skin pale and gray, their fat reserves long since spent, and they would at last be ready to spawn.

Kevin handed me a fly rod. On the end was a "fly" that was nothing like a fly. It was hot pink and looked, if anything, like some kind of My Little Pony accessory. To a salmon, this fly in no way resembles food—nor should it, because salmon do not eat when they reenter freshwater (even they seem to realize that food immediately before sex is gauche). But for whatever reason—maybe because they are infuriated by its sheer tackiness—they will bite at a gaudy pink gewgaw.

Which was precisely what happened. I cast my line across the river and stripped it in with short, fast jerks, as instructed by Kevin. I felt a soft tug, but just as quickly it was gone, and I wondered if I'd imagined it. I stripped the line in some more. Another tug, only this time whatever it was kept tugging. There was a salmon on the end of my line, a pink salmon so fresh that it was still wearing its oceangoing outfit of silvery green. It thrashed up out of the water, then headed straight for the bottom and held there, stubborn, angry, occasionally tearing off more line as it burst up, down, or across the river. I would pull. Then it would pull. Then I would pull again. Finally, it shook its head, spat out the hook, and was gone, leaving me with nothing but the lure, which was fine with me because that fish—that beautiful, wonderful fish—was always destined to be released.

Those five hundred salmon may have been fasting, but we were not, and it was getting on to lunch. We climbed back into the helicopter, buckled up, and put on our helmets (the noise inside the aircraft would have been intolerable without helmets). Kevin fired the engine and the blades began turning—hilariously slowly at first, but after a minute or so they cranked up to 390 revolutions per minute. Kevin inclined the angle of the blades, and the beast started to rise. This, I was surprised to learn is how a helicopter works. The blades always spin at the same speed. The lift is solely a function of their angle. They either scoop air or they do not.

We blasted up to six thousand feet, crossed a range of peaks sharp enough to slice tomatoes, and set down on the gleaming glacier that crowns Mount Benedict. Kevin pulled a cooler from the helicopter's luggage compartment and extracted an assortment of goodies, setting it all out on a portable table.

And thus we are sitting at the top of the world, eating Dungeness crab cakes and drinking chardonnay and staring off in every jaw-dropping direction. Occasionally, someone attempts to say something appropriate to the moment—"Magnificent, isn't it?"—and fails utterly. It is the sort of experience that doesn't seem possible even as it's unfolding. But eventually you accept what life has brought you and take another sip of wine.

Temperate rain forests are a rare yet heady mix of rain, mountain, and sea, and in the Great Bear Rainforest, these three elements seem to be competing with one another for grandeur. Rainfall nourishes trees that grow to over three hundred feet and live for more than fourteen hundred years. The mountains reach well over ten thousand feet into the sky, are bearded in evergreens, and are capped with glacial bowls that look like God-sized servings of Cool Whip. Nothing, of course, is bigger than the Pacific, and as though to prove the point, it sends in waves as tall as houses during winter hurricanes.

Even before the invention of the chain saw, temperate rain forests were the exception, geographically speaking. Historically, they have made up less than one-fifth of one percent of the earth's landmass. North America's temperate rain forest was always the grandest, and once spread from the Alaskan border down to northern California. Today, less than half of the planet's temperate rain forests are still standing, and the Great Bear, which stretches over eight million acres, is the largest surviving example.

At ten thousand years old, the region, birthed during the last ice age, is young compared with the rest of the continent. You can still see remnants of the glaciers that once reigned here crowning the tops of mountains. Youthful exuberance is everywhere—the rivers are all in a hurry, the mountains stand tall and lanky, and the fauna are big and plentiful.

In truth, the biological abundance is a direct product of the sublime interaction between sea and land. At the coastal edge, fingers of ocean entwine with fingers of land, and arteries of water send a constant supply of food up into the mountains in the form of migrating salmon. Everything that can eat the salmon does. Wolves pounce on salmon swimming in the shallows. Bald eagles swoop out of the treetops to grab hold of salmon so huge that they occasionally drag the big birds under. And bears stand at the tops of waterfalls and catch salmon midair in their snouts. Even the carcasses—which get taken into the brush where they can be enjoyed in peace—help the trees to grow tall. Thanks in large part to all those salmon, each acre of the Great Bear Rainforest holds a staggering five hundred tons of biomass, more aggregate life than in a tropical rain forest.

Undoubtedly, it is the bounty of fresh fish that first drew the native peoples, who settled this region about nine thousand years ago. It is also what brought Craig Murray here. He was a refugee from eastern Canada who moved west in 1973. In 1980, Murray was living on Vancouver Island, in a town called Port MacNeil, where he had the most Canadian job possible: He was the manager of a local hockey arena. That year, panicked at his prospects for supporting his young family, Murray decided to open a resort. He picked Little Nimmo Bay because shooting down the side of Mount Stevens was a stream that could power a generator.

For the first three years, there were no helicopters at Nimmo Bay. People arrived by seaplane to fish for salmon, and Murray took them out into the sound in little aluminum boats. Then, in 1983, he went fishing with a helicopter pilot named Peter Barratt. "We headed to a river twenty minutes north and caught two big salmon right away," Murray says. "The light went on. I mean, it was blistering."

The next several years were a period of helicopter-enabled exploration as much for Murray and Barratt as for their guests. On one not atypical afternoon, Barratt flew over a river he'd never seen before and landed to get a better look. He grabbed his fly rod from the back of the helicopter and caught a salmon so big it pulled him into the water. After releasing it, he spent the next several hours dozing naked in the cockpit while his clothes hung out to dry on the rotor blades. In 1984, Murray and Barratt were flying fifty miles northwest of Nimmo Bay when they set the helicopter down on a crescent beach. It stretched at least three hundred feet from forest to ocean, and where it met the treeline there was a graveyard of enormous four-hundred-year-old trunks that had been slapped against the shore by winter storms. On the afternoon I visited, Kevin and I walked barefoot next to those trunks, skeletons from an age gone by, and ate the wild peas growing beside them.

The stories, like the land itself, possess an epic quality. Four years ago, Murray and a group of guests were flying up Mackenzie Sound on their way back to Nimmo Bay when they spotted a herd of seals swimming frantically; about fifty yards behind them, a pod of killer whales were in pursuit. They cornered their prey in Little Nimmo Bay, right in front of the lodge, and everyone watched from the safety of the helicopter as a terrible massacre unfolded. Seals were getting chomped in half and tossed twenty feet into the air; the green water of Little Nimmo Bay turned red with blood. The lesson, of course, is that the beauty here is only skin-deep: Underneath, there's a raging economy of calories.

On my third and final day at Nimmo, I decide to go and see some of those whales. The rest of my group is intent on more fishing, so Murray puts me into a smaller helicopter called a Jet Ranger with Peter Barratt. When you take off in a helicopter, it isn't so much that you rise into the air as that the world seems to fall away. The upward trajectory is urgent yet carefree, like a yo-yo zooming back up its string. As you watch the world recede to miniature-golf proportions, you can't help but crack a big smile. From a thousand feet and climbing, it's impossible not to see life as a comedy.

Yesterday, there were reports of 120 whales swimming in the Queen Charlotte Strait. Today, there are none. So we shoot across the strait to a place called Cormorant Island and touch down next to the tallest totem pole in the world. At a height of 173 feet, it stands smack in the middle of a town of eighteen hundred called Alert Bay, half of which is populated by the Kwakwaka'wakw people, whose wild, grotesque, and gloriously colorful masks, totem poles, and shields are on display in the museum next door.

Afterward, Barratt takes me over to the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, where we zoom up a river, bald eagles flapping majestically right next to us. Upstream, he shows me an ancient salmon trap built by natives centuries ago. Somehow, they were able to reconfigure the rocky floor of the river into a giant inverted V. Salmon would swim into the wide end of the V and then squeeze through a small opening at the top, into the waiting arms of a fisherman.

Closer to the mainland, we finally spot some life: a pod of Pacific white-sided dolphins. They are jumping in the festive arcs dolphins are famous for, chasing schools of herring that look like dark, inky blobs. From our lofty perspective, I can take in the whole ecosystem, the nutrient chain that starts in the ocean below and reverse-commutes all the way up into the mountains on the horizon. The life cycle of the salmon is one of this planet's grandest living metaphors. They die so that the next generation might live, which makes them seem stoic and noble—although if you ask me, it's a real shame it should happen so soon after they lose their virginity. Suddenly, I am anxious to catch another one.

So Barratt flies inland. He is playing The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" through the in-helmet sound system as we pass so close to the chiseled faces of six-thousand-foot peaks that I feel like nodding and saying, "Hell of an afternoon." Barratt parks the Jet Ranger at the confluence of two rivers: Morgan's Creek, a deep emerald green, and the Klinaklini, which is the color of chocolate milk. I stand in the middle of this Neapolitan swirl and cast. At the far bank, pink salmon are jumping everywhere. No one knows why they do this, but it's hard to think of a better way for a fish to express lust and vitality.

Ten minutes later, I am standing on the sandy shore, holding an eight-pound salmon that has spent the past two years in the ocean. It is smooth to the touch and pretty enough to kiss. I slip the gaudy fly out of its mouth, dip the fish back into the river where the current isn't too strong, and watch it swim away into the deep, cold water.

On the way back to Nimmo Bay, Barratt takes me on what's called a river run: At a height of twenty feet, going 120 miles per hour, we follow the winding path of the silty Klinaklini. Barratt is cranking Enya, the ethereal-sounding New Age Irish musician. For the first time in my life, I understand the point of Enya.

As we make the final approach to Nimmo Bay (and I mean final: I have a flight to catch in Port Hardy in two hours), Barratt puts the helicopter into a steep climb and executes a 180-degree turn, sending my heart into my throat and my stomach to the floor. After a fleeting moment of weightlessness, which I mistake for the calm before the end—my end—Barratt turns to me, grinning, and says, "We call that move a hammerhead." Then he takes the helicopter down, aims for the helipad, and lands light as a feather.